The King Had Blood on His Hand
Louis XV believed he had received nothing more than a punch. He brought his hand to his side, drew it back covered in blood, and the ordinary motion of a monarch stepping into his carriage suddenly became an affair of state. A man had just approached him in the Marble Court. He was seized almost instantly. Nothing more was required than a chamber for the wounded sovereign, a guarded room for the assailant, and couriers swift enough to carry the terror from Versailles to Paris.
On January 5, 1757, the cold was so piercing that the king had layered his garments. He had journeyed from Trianon to visit his daughters at Versailles and was departing at the close of the afternoon. Torches were few. Edmond-Jean-François Barbier, who recorded the intelligence in his chronicle, describes the man clad in black brushing past a guard, bringing his hand near the royal shoulder, and then striking. The sovereign ascended to his apartments without need of being carried. Linen was sought, a surgeon summoned; those whose offices should have placed them at his side were not all present. Majesty possessed its household, its officers, its customs. The emergency laid bare the breaches between them all.
The wound had not penetrated the chest. The physicians were soon able to reassure the royal entourage. There had also been apprehension that the blade was poisoned; this dread attached itself naturally to all the others, for the true name of the man who wielded it remained unknown. The king would survive. For Robert-François Damiens, however, this blow that failed to kill inaugurated three months of captivity and torment.
A Domestic Servant and Many Possible Masters
In the chamber where he was detained, he was searched. The knife, some money, and a religious volume were among the effects found upon his person. The earliest dispatches obscured his identity: one Christian name supplanted another; he was credited with a shop or some haphazard trade. Men from the Arras coach service were even brought in to determine whether they had carried him. They failed to recognize him. Amid the conjectures, one certainty at last emerged: the man had long been a domestic servant.
His former masters might therefore shed light upon his movements, his acquaintances, and his conduct. Yet the inquiry sought far more than a biography. It sought accomplices. The coin discovered in his pockets could be construed as the wages of an assassination; a word overheard, the proof of an instigator; a former post, the seeds of a conspiracy. Barbier methodically records the suspicions directed against the English, with whom France was then at war, against the Jesuits, and against the enemies of the latter. As the king’s health ceased to cause alarm, the quest for the plot consumed all conversation.
Damiens had not waited for a tribunal to suffer violence. At Versailles, guards had scorched his legs with fire-heated pincers to compel him to speak. This early brutality must remain within the narrative: the statements subsequently gathered did not emerge from any unconstrained exchange. Yet his life was guarded with extreme solicitude, for it was imperative that he remain capable of answering. The judicial apparatus required this man whom it was destined to condemn; no one was to snatch him away before the appointed hour.
The Tower and the Voices of Paris
The question of the competent court provoked further turmoil. The assault had been committed within a royal residence; the Provostship of the Hôtel had commenced the preliminary examination. The Parlement claimed the right of judgment. The dispute already simmering between the king and a faction of the magistrates rendered this assertion delicate. Authority was finally conferred upon the assembled Grand’Chambre by letters patent in January. Even before the prisoner’s answers could be debated, men contested who possessed the right to hear them.
At the Conciergerie, the Montgomery Tower was prepared. Visits by magistrates and officers charged with the watch followed in rapid succession; it was necessary to secure the doors, the surveillance, and the heating of a chamber wherein the prisoner would be interrogated. The memory of Ravaillac returned incessantly. It weighed upon the captive’s lodging as heavily as upon the penalty already contemplated. Damiens had struck Louis XV; an entire century of memories came to take its place around his pallet.
His declarations pointed back to religious quarrels, the refusal of the sacraments, and the hostile discourse he claimed to have heard. He maintained that he had wished to wound the king without killing him. This did not diminish the assault; nor did it reveal an organized faction behind him. This contradiction withstood the interrogations, the suspicions, and the violence inflicted upon the prisoner. A man could take up political furies without having received an order. A tribunal could search for a conspiracy and find none.
In March, the family was confronted with the accused. Other names circulated. One tale even attributed to him the poisoning of a former master; Barbier recorded it, then refuted it. Arrests heralded as decisive fed fresh expectations. The pamphlets took sides with greater boldness than the evidence warranted. Every camp seemed to desire that a domestic servant had obeyed its adversaries: thus the crime might be comprehended, and thus it might be presented to them as the settlement of all prior animosities.
What the Decree Ordained
On March 26, Damiens was condemned for divine and human lèse-majesté. The decree prescribed the *amende honorable*, followed by public torture in the Place de Grève, concluding with quartering and the consumption of the remains by fire. It further ordered the question, in order to wring from him the revelation of accomplices. None had been established; they were still awaited. The sentence struck likewise at his ancestral home, marked for demolition, as though the soil upon which the man was born had shared in his design.
On the 28th, following torture and renewed interrogations, Damiens departed the Conciergerie in a tumbrel. Two ecclesiastics accompanied him. He halted at Notre-Dame before being conveyed to the Grève. The windows were filled, the rooftops crowded. Troops patrolled the city; the Jesuit houses were watched with particular vigilance, so acute was the fear of an uprising. The multitude had come to see a man die, and the authorities still dreaded what it might do as it watched.
The execution was protracted. The horses proved initially insufficient to carry out what the magistrates had set down on paper. It became necessary to suspend the operation, request further instructions, and begin anew. This delay prolonged the horror of those who watched and the discomfiture of those who commanded: an edict formulated in the serene order of a judicial decree produced, upon the public square, a spectacle that the executioners themselves could not direct as planned. Damiens died at last, and his remains were burned to ashes.
On the morrow, justice turned its attention to the living. His father, his wife, and his daughter were banished from the realm; the other members of the family were forbidden ever to bear the name of Damiens. Several suspects were discharged. The printers, for their part, soon answered for pamphlets deemed defamatory. The affair continued to dispense its reverberations long after the condemned man was dead.
The king had healed. The man had been destroyed, his kin menaced, the obliteration of his house and his name decreed. Yet no definitive countenance had been given to the grand conspiracy awaited since January. The void left behind Damiens was destined to outlive him, enduring as long as the memory of the torture employed to make him speak.